Free Maigret Gets Angry by Georges Simenon Page A

former
superior.
    ‘You’re in Paris, chief? … Have
a seat.’
    He immediately noticed Maigret’s sunburn.
That day, everyone would notice his sunburn and nine out of ten of them would not fail to remark
with satisfaction:
    ‘You’ve obviously come up from the
country!’
    As if he hadn’t been living in the country
for the last two years!
    ‘Tell me, Lucas, do you remember
Mimile?’
    ‘Mimile from the circus?’
    ‘That’s right. I’d like to get
hold of him today.’
    ‘You sound as if you’re on a case,
chief.’
    ‘A fool’s errand, more like! Anyway
… I’ll tell you all about it another time. Can you track down Mimile?’
    Lucas opened the door to the inspectors’
office and spoke in a hushed voice. He must have been telling them the former chief was there
and that he needed Mimile. During the half-hour that followed, nearly all of Maigret’s
former team contrived to pop into Lucas’ office under some pretext or another, to come and
shake hands with him.
    ‘You’ve caught the sun, chief!
You’ve obviously—’
    ‘And another thing, Lucas. I could do it
myself, but it’s tiresome. I’d like the lowdown on the Amorelle and Campois firm of
Quai Bourbon. The sand quarries of the Seine, the tug-boats and everything else.’
    ‘I’ll put Janvier on it, chief. Is it
urgent?’
    ‘I’d like to be done with it by
midday.’
    He mooched around HQ, dropped into the finance
division. They had heard of Amorelle and Campois, but
they didn’t have any inside information.
    ‘A big outfit. They have a lot of
subsidiaries. It’s a robust concern and we haven’t had any dealings with
them.’
    It was good to breathe the air of the place, to
shake hands, to see the pleasure in every pair of eyes.
    ‘So, how’s your garden, chief? And
what about the fishing?’
    He went up to Criminal Records. Nothing on the
Maliks. It was at the last moment, when he was on the point of leaving, that it occurred to him
to search under the letter C.
    Campois … Roger Campois … Hello,
hello! There’s a file on Campois: Roger Campois, son of Désiré Campois,
industrialist. Blew his brains out in a hotel room on the Boulevard Saint-Michel.
    He checked the dates, the addresses, the first
names. Désiré Campois had indeed been the partner of old Amorelle, he was the man
Maigret had glimpsed at Orsenne. He had been married to a certain Armande Tenissier, daughter of
a civil engineering entrepreneur and now deceased, with whom he had had two children, a boy and
a girl.
    It was the boy, Roger, Désiré’s
son, who had committed suicide at the age of twenty-two.
For some months had been frequenting the gambling dens of the Latin Quarter and had
recently lost heavily at the gaming tables.
    As
for the daughter, she had married and had borne a child, probably the young man he had seen with
his grandfather at Orsenne.
    Had she died too? What had become of her husband,
a certain Lorigan? There was no mention in the file.
    ‘Fancy a beer, Lucas?’
    At the Brasserie Dauphine, of course, behind the
Palais de Justice, where he had downed so many beers in his life. The air was pungent, like a
fruit, with refreshing blasts punctuating the warm atmosphere. And it was a delightful sight to
see a municipal street cleaner spraying wide bands of water on the tarmac.
    ‘I wouldn’t dream of questioning you,
chief, but I confess that I’m wondering—’
    ‘What I’m up to, eh? I’m
wondering too. And it is highly likely that tonight I’ll be getting myself into serious
trouble. Look! Here comes Torrence!’
    Fat Torrence, who had been tasked with locating
Mimile, knew where to find him. He had already accomplished his mission.
    ‘Unless he’s changed his job in the
last two days, chief, you’ll find him working as an animal keeper at Luna Park. A
beer!’
    Then, Janvier, good old Janvier – how good
they all were that day, and how good it was to be with them, how good it was to be working with
the boys again! – Janvier too